


Someone to rely on

by StevetheIcecube



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Fluff, F/F, Family Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Minor Character Death, Sibling Fluff, Trans Male Character, discovering sexuality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-13 19:17:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13577229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StevetheIcecube/pseuds/StevetheIcecube
Summary: Mòrag thought her life was pretty good, and then everything got messed up and she had to cancel all her life plans to look after her recently orphaned cousin. Managing university on top of that was pretty difficult, and she was struggling. But then in came Brighid, and everything changed.





	1. A Break

Mòrag hated how her life had turned out sometimes. Just under two years ago, she’d thought that all her family troubles were over. No more hateful parents watching over her every movement, just her aunt and uncle and her adorable cousin, who all loved her. Now she was free, she could move schools, focus on her studies, and finally be happy. A year and a half passed and her life was really on the right track: she’d started university, she had a boyfriend, and everything was great. She was happy.

Everything went wrong. She didn’t really know when it happened, exactly, but things started by falling apart with her boyfriend. It was the end of the year, they were both revising for their exams and things were a little stressful. She hadn’t seen him for maybe a couple of days because they were both pretty busy, but they’d been texting a bit.

‘Hey babe when can I come over? ;)’ Mòrag scowled at the text when her phone buzzed. She was trying to work. She still had another exam in the morning and she wasn’t in the mood to be interrupted.

‘I’m working rn, also I have a name :) ask again later.’ With that, she put her phone on silent and turned it over so she wouldn’t see if anything else came up, and then she picked up her book again and continued reading.

A couple of hours passed, and when she was done with the last couple of chapters she needed to revise for the exam, she got up to make herself a cup of tea. The rest of her exams had gone pretty well, if she was being honest with herself, and she was confident that this one would be the same. She’d worked hard for this, and she was ready to go home and spend the summer with her family.

Once her tea was done, she wandered back over to the armchair in her room. Her eyes fell on her phone, and she felt her heart leap for a moment. She’d completely forgotten that she’d basically told her boyfriend to shut up. Oops. She turned it over, and it was flashing to notify she’d been messaged. That was to be expected, but when she turned it on, it came up that he’d texted her multiple times.

‘Yeah k just snub me again’  
‘Can’t you tell it’s a cute nickname?’  
‘You take your work way too seriously, try to chill a little’  
‘Seriously you’re never any fun to be around anymore’  
‘Can I come round later? We won’t even see each other over the summer’  
‘Is 7 okay? Pls don’t be frigid this time xx’

Mòrag just frowned at the messages. She didn’t like to be snappy with him, but...he was being a bit sniffy lately, getting annoyed at things that he’d accommodated before, particularly the slow pace of their relationship. ‘You can come tomorrow afternoon?’ She suggested. ‘Kinda just want to think about exams rn.’

‘Ok I won’t bother,’ he sent back. ‘Now’s probably a good time to end it anyway.’

‘What?’ She hadn’t been expecting this. She’d thought that they were just going to have to have a conversation to work things out once all the stress of exams was over. Not...whatever this is. ‘Come over tonight if you really need to discuss your rash decisions.’

‘Thats exactly why im breaking up with you,’ he said. ‘Ur so uptight and you don’t even want to kiss me. Why are you even in a relationship with me? A man has needs and you don’t even feel bad about not being enough. I swear you’re prob a lesbian and just using me.’

Delightful. Mòrag didn’t even know how to feel. Her mind was swimming and she felt oddly detached from the words in front of her. She didn’t know if she was sad, but her chest was hurting. With immense difficulty, she managed to stop herself throwing her phone across the room. She didn’t want to have to deal with whatever this was now.

She wanted to send a foul response, but she also wanted to be mature. He’d just subjected her to some rather foul abuse and she wanted to feel superior to him in this moment. ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t find it in yourself to care about my feelings,’ she wrote. Was that too much? Was it too vague? She deleted it after staring at it for a moment. Then she put it back before sending it. ‘I thought you were better than the kind of man who sees a girlfriend only as a living sex toy. I thought our relationship was going in the right direction specifically because you weren’t pressuring me into anything. I do not mind that I no longer have to live up to your unreasonable expectations.’

Satisfied with her reply, she sent it and put her phone on her desk. She didn’t really feel like talking to him again for now. She had a cup of tea to drink and she was determined to enjoy it more than any time she’d spent with her now ex boyfriend.

It was strange. She’d never thought about breaking up with him, and she’d never thought he would break up with her. He was the one who’d asked her in the first place. She had been flattered and unsure how to respond, but their relationship hadn’t been difficult. When she was able to ignore the fact that he clearly wanted to be more intimate with her, it was no different to a normal friendship, and that was when she’d enjoyed it.

Now she wasn’t sure how to feel. She didn’t have all that many friends here in Gormott; it was a new country and she always struggled to connect to people anyway. Outside of him, she’d only had a couple of friends, and they were more his friends than hers. At least it was the end of term, and she wouldn’t have to see him in any of her lessons or even just around town. All she had to do was get through the exam tomorrow, and then she would leave at the weekend and everything would be fine.

The issue was what to do now. She felt restless and antsy and she wanted to do something, she just didn’t know what. Some kind of ugly feeling was building up inside her and she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or just punch that stupid arsehole right in the face. Instead, she texted her aunt to ask if she could call them all for a bit.

Half an hour later, she was sitting on her bed, acting out passages from ‘The Tale of the Hero King’, voices included, to Niall, who was watching, enraptured. He was ten, nearly eleven, and whenever she asked if he wanted to hear a story before he went to bed he said no, but he clearly loved them all anyway. He was reading far beyond these little stories, of course, but there was something about them that kept drawing him back in.

Sitting here like this, talking to Niall and making him happy, she barely cared that she’d just lost her sixth month long relationship. She’d be home by the weekend, and she could have a long, fun summer without any of the stress that came with having to maintain a relationship over a distance.

At the time, it had seemed like her summer would be fine, and fun, and she’d be happy. But the world was determined to hate her and pull everything apart over the next few months, and she ended up with a situation she’d never anticipated.


	2. Moving On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mòrag and Niall, after everything goes wrong.

Mòrag had officially decided, at this point, that she hated being an adult. She’d been an adult for a year and a half now now, but she’d never really felt responsible for stuff before. And now...now her aunt and uncle were gone. And they’d asked for her to be the legal guardian of Niall. She couldn’t refuse, of course. There was no way she could refuse a request from them. Especially not when Niall’s future was on the line.

Things had been tough over the last couple of weeks. She’d had to make quite a few tough decisions that she was completely unprepared for. How was she to know that something like this would happen? She had to organise the funeral and set up a whole bunch of things with social services and the government just so they could make it through the summer without running out of money.

The phone rang, and Mòrag could see that it was the local university. She hated to do this, honestly, because she’d invested so much time in going out to study in another country. “Hello?” She said.

“Hello, is this Mòrag Ladair?” It was the same nice administrator for Law as before. “I was just calling to ask you for an interview in the faculty at some point next week. This isn’t normal procedure, but as you’ve been studying Ardainian and Gormotti Law in another country we need to just verbally cover what you’ve studied.”

“I- okay,” she said. Her immediate thought was that she couldn’t do it because she had to make sure Niall was okay, but she was sure she could do something like drop him off in the library or leave him in a reception area under someone else’s watchful eye. She just...she was loathe to let him out of her sight, even, after what happened. “I’m responsible for a minor, it was my reason for transfer, is there any way he could-”

“I’m sure someone would be happy to watch him, as long as he can be left to his own devices,” the woman said. She was being a lot nicer about all of this than the administration at Torigoth. They’d been rather snippy about her request to transfer away from the university and had even had the audacity to ask her to go to her academic counsellor to ‘discuss her decision’.

“Thank you,” she said, moving through the living room rearranging half the room as quietly as she could in an attempt to find her diary (it was under a mug, for some reason). “Could we arrange a date for that now?”

-

Three days later, she dragged Niall out of the house at nine in the morning, much to his protestation. He didn’t like getting up early during the holidays and he’d managed to pick up Mòrag’s very student habit of not getting out of bed until midday every day. Which was pretty bad, considering he was only eleven. He didn’t need those kinds of habits.

“But it’s so early!” He complained. He was practically dragging his feet. “Why didn’t you tell them to make it later? It’s still too early for you, you’re basically sleepwalking.”

“Enough with the sass, young man,” she said. “I was up late last night preparing for this so I can transfer here.” Niall just nodded but he still pulled a face at her. He knew that this was important, or he wouldn’t be able to stay with her, but he was still content to tease her about it.

“You could turn your sock the right way round,” he suggested, pulling a classic innocent face while glancing down at her left sock. She looked down as well, of course to find that her socks were perfectly fine. Niall was just laughing at her now. “Made you look.”

“Shh, you,” she said. “Or I’ll sue you for misinformation.”

“You can’t sue a minor,” he said, the grin on his face widening. “You’d just be suing yourself because you’re responsible for my actions.”

“If I sue myself it cuts down on legal fees,” she said. “And if I’m in court suing myself you’d have to cook your own food.”

Niall considered her proposal for a moment and then nodded. “I won’t tell you if your sock is inside out or not in the future,” he decided, and she laughed. It was good that he was still so cheerful. She found it hard to have such a positive outlook on everything, and he was the one who’d lost his parents.

Being an adult was hard. She had to do all the house stuff, and managing her finances was so much harder now she was allowing for everything Niall needed too. She could just about balance things without a part time job, but as soon as the school term started and Niall would inevitably need new shoes, uniform, books, and school supplies, she knew it was going to get harder.

On top of that, there was stress. She was stressed about university and she was stressed about money and stressed that she was throwing her youth away, even though she wanted to take care of Niall. She was worried that she wouldn’t raise him properly, and that he was going to get bullied at his new school. She was so stressed it was hard to get a proper night of sleep, yet with looking after Niall it was important that she did that.

It was so much to balance. Honestly, she’d considered dropping out of university entirely. It wasn’t like she had any friends here, and because she was a transfer everyone else would have friends already. She’d felt fairly isolated at Torigoth University but this would be something entirely different. She wouldn’t have any time to have a social life anyway. But she knew that she couldn’t just stop university after working so hard for it. She’d done really well in her first year exams and it just wouldn’t make any sense to quit now, even if it would be the easier option.

“Stop thinking so much,” Niall said, reaching over and squeezing her hand. He was getting big now and didn’t need to hold her hand when they were walking by the side of the road, but she appreciated the gesture. He was a lot more mature than his age suggested. “You’re getting all worried again. Don’t, they’ll like you and you’ll be fine. You’re super smart!”

She smiled at him. “Don’t you worry about me,” she said. “You worry about if you can wrangle any biscuits out of the administrator.”

“Will do,” he said, giving her a little salute. As they made their way towards the main humanities buildings of the university, Mòrag looked around. She’d seen the outside of the university plenty of times but never really been inside. She wasn’t going to get the chance to go to the library today, but she’d heard the facilities were very good.

Once they got to the building with the offices for the law professors, she sat with Niall for a couple of minutes while he chatted to the administrator about the school stuff he liked. It was sweet of her to do something like that, seeing as she really didn’t have to. Everyone was so friendly here, and Niall was taking all the strange stuff in his stride. At moments like this, her worries felt insignificant and it looked like everything was going to be okay. She just hoped that it could be this way for as long as possible.


	3. Fears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the day before Niall goes back to school.

“Mòrag?” It was one in the morning when she heard Niall call from the other side of her bedroom door. He shouldn’t be up, but then again neither should she. They’d both be leaving the house within seven hours so Mòrag could walk him to his first day back at school, yet neither of them were asleep. “Can I come in?”

“Come on in,” she called, and Niall opened the door. He looked tired and most definitely upset. Mòrag sat up, shifted over in her bed, and motioned for him to come and sit next to her. He did, and she put an arm around him before saying anything else. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to go to a new school,” he said. She nodded. She knew the feeling. Starting over somewhere new was something she’d done far too frequently in the last few years. “I’m worried I’ll have to explain...everything again.”

“You don’t owe that to anyone,” she said. At his previous school, lots of the parents asked Niall all sorts of uncomfortable questions about his gender. She was honestly quite worried about how kids would take that as they started to grow up and probably closed their minds a little, but Niall had told her he couldn’t exactly hide from it, so he’d have to face up to it.

“I mean I know I don’t, but it’ll come up eventually, won’t it? Because they’ll think it’s weird that I change clothes somewhere else. And then when I get older they’ll think it’s weird that I haven’t hit puberty or anything.” Mòrag had hoped that they’d just cross this bridge when they came to it, and she had been hoping that it would be later that Niall would start thinking about those things. She didn’t feel ready yet. She’d always known that him being trans would be more difficult as he became a teenager, but she’d expected her aunt and uncle to be there for it.

“Well, it will come up,” she said. “Do you want to tell people, or would you rather them not know you’re trans at all?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t want them to go spreading it around to people I don’t know. But I don’t want to pretend I’m not trans, because then I feel like I’m just...tricking people.”

“Not telling people would be for your own safety,” Mòrag said immediately. This was something she’d thought about a lot with her own identity (and something she’d been thinking about even more, recently), and she didn’t want Niall tearing himself up over it. “Your safety is most important here.”

“I don’t want to have to lie my whole life,” he said. He sounded really upset. “I want to be open. But I don’t want people to be shit about it.”

“Language, Niall!” She said, gently nudging him in the side with her elbow.

“Heck you,” he said, and she nudged him again. “I learnt it from you.”

“Shh, don’t say that kind of thing around your teachers, they’ll think I’m a bad influence.”

“You’re a non-straight full time student,” he said. “Of course you’re a bad influence, that’s why you’re great.”

“May as well call me gay at this point,” she said, and then she’d realised what she’d said. She wasn’t even sure about that and she didn’t want to even entertain that what her ex had said about her was true. “I don’t have much luck with men.”

“He wasn’t a good boyfriend,” Niall said. “But that’s- that’s another thing. Some people like to start dating and stuff and I don’t know… I don’t want people to spread rumours about me.”

“It’s secondary school,” she said with a sigh. “There will always be rumours. These are all things that probably will happen, but we can’t do anything about it now, okay?” Niall nodded. “We can deal with it if it happens, and address it in the right context. Does that help?”

He nodded. “I should probably go to sleep,” he said. He sounded a lot less worried now. “You should too. Are you sure it’s okay for you to walk me in tomorrow?”

“It’s going to be weird without you around,” she admitted. She hadn’t been alone in the house since her aunt and uncle died. Niall had always been there, or there’d been people coming in to meet them, and she didn’t know what it was going to be like when he was gone. She didn’t know how it would feel, alone in the house. “I wish we could be here enough that we could get a pet.”

“Can we get a dog?” Niall asked. “Please, I’d look after it!”

“We can’t,” she said. “During term time, we’ll both be out for most of the day. Dogs need company and they need to be let out to go for a wee. I would get a dog if we could.” She didn’t want to say that they’d never be able to afford it, because she didn’t want Niall to be worried about money.

“Aww,” he said. “Don’t get a job when you graduate, get a dog instead.” Mòrag laughed. It was tempting, honestly, but she couldn’t do that to Niall. She wanted him to have as much stability as possible, honestly, and that meant getting a job, any graduate job, as soon as possible.

“How about you go back to bed?” She suggested. “I’ll go to sleep too.”

“I’ll go to sleep if you promise to get a dog,” Niall said, sticking his tongue out at her. Without her saying anything more, he leaned closer again and hugged her before pulling away and getting out of her bed. “Goodnight!”

“Sleep well,” she said with a smile. “And actually sleep this time, okay? Being awake for school is good.” Niall grinned and shot her a little salute again before leaving the room. Architect, she was going to miss him when he was at school tomorrow.

In the morning, both of them slept slightly too late and were, consequently, running around the house madly in the morning. “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t have any black socks?” Mòrag asked, watching as Niall frantically went through the entire wash basket to find some.

“I didn’t know!” He said, and Mòrag watched in mild disgust as he pulled two socks that vaguely match out from under...something. She would take care not to touch those socks when she was putting the laundry in next. “I’m nearly ready to go.”

“What else do you need?” She asked. Niall was meant to be getting to school fairly early so he didn’t get lost, but at this rate they’d be lucky if he was even on time.

“Pen,” he said, trailing his bag behind him as he went to the drawer with all the stationary.

“How did you forget a pen?” She asked, grabbing her jacket and Niall’s school shoes from the side. He’d brought them to one side of the hall and then left them when he went to the living room and she could just see him traipsing back over the hall to retrieve them again (but not before realising he’d forgotten them again and worrying about having lost them...again).

“Slipped my mind,” he said with a shrug, pulling a pen out with a grin on his face and stuffing it into his bag.

“You’re going to forget where that is,” she said, and Niall nodded, sighed, and opened the other section of his bag so he could put it in his pencil case. “Your shoes are here.”

“Thanks,” he said, shooting her a grin. She looked at him for a moment, pulling on his shoes and getting ready to go. He was growing up so quickly and it wasn’t fair that she was the only one here to see it. “I-I could stay here, if you wanted.”

Mòrag could only smile. “No, it’d be the same tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s get going. If you go to school, you can come home and tell me all about it this afternoon. Can’t do that if you don’t go.”

“Okay,” he said, stepping forward and hugging her again. “Mum and Dad would be happy.” His voice cracked a little, but he was smiling, and Mòrag managed a smile in return. Seeing Niall grow up like this was worth every minute, even if it hurt sometimes.


End file.
